Saturday, January 01, 2005

Everybody knows that a vampire cannot see himself in the mirror. If a vampire stands in a crowd of people at a party, looking over their shoulders to see into the mirror on the wall, he will see everybody else's reflection, but not his own. He will see people happy and not so happy, people arguing and flirting, people striking up conversations that will lead to long-lasting friendships, people making connections.

The vampire tries to mix and mingle at the party, tries to blend in. He eats hors d'oeuvres and laughs and chats politely. But he keeps looking over his shoulder at the mirror, hoping to find himself among the guests. He never does.

The mirror speaks to every person who passes by: "This is who you are. You are tall or short, pretty or plain, male or female" To the vampire, however, the mirror says, "You should not be here. You do not belong here. You are dead."

2 comments:

Hmmm... You must be using a different source for your vampire lore. (Anne Rice?) Classically, the "fact" that a vampire casts no image in a mirror is something that often revealed a vampire to others; while, for the vampire, to see the image in a mirror was too horrible to bear. (Think of Bela Lugosi's "Count Dracula" swatting with fury the mirror in the music box from Prof. Van Helsing's hands in the 1932 version of Dracula...) My theory is that the mirror shows the "truth" about the vampire, with all the corruption of being "undead"; and the evil that is attached to their being. Confronted with the horror of their own being, they cannot bear to see themselves... In a way, a gift that would serve each of us well, spurring us to confession and repentance -- not options for the "undead"...